If you want to know what legal problems beset the average Australian, there is one source which claims “on the ground” stats. LawPath, the online legal platform that has been making waves in the legal industry for the past six months, says it has a pretty good handle on what prompts Australians to seek legal advice.

LawPath is angling itself as the punters' legal platform, where no question is too stupid to ask, and no lawyer too lofty for consultation. In less than a year it has accrued close to 350 lawyers on its books, matchmaking them with more than 3000 clients. It is backed by start-up specialist Pollenizer, and global legal database supplier LexisNexis. It has also just announced that a major investor is putting up $600,000 to help the platform with its ambitions in Asia.

Among LawPath clients is former iron man and fitness guru Guy Leech who says he has used it for two minor matters.

The platform, founded by Paul Lupson and Damian Andreason, is no legal directory. It acts as filter sizing up legal problems and passing on a potential client to an appropriate lawyer. That lawyer is bound by LawPath to offer his or her first half hour consultation free.

“The point of this is to take away the fear factor,” says Lupson. “People don't approach lawyers because they think every time they pick up the phone they're up for $500.”

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Once LawPath makes the connection, the client and lawyer then decide where the relationship will go.

It's unsurprising that questions of divorce, separation and division of assets top the platforms' query list, with female clients the most common. Next are the myriad problems that beset small businesses which might relate to drawing up shareholder agreements, intellectual property, franchising disputes, unpaid bills and consumer complaints.

Lupson had a successful online hotel reservation platform in Europe but its sale was dogged by legal problems. The difficulty in finding the right lawyer, coupled with a later meeting with Pollenizer, formed the resolve behind the start-up.

While there are other online legal platforms around the world, LawPath's big coup has been to involve LexisNexis which provides it with “Rolls-Royce” legal documents, normally the preserve of much larger firms. It has digitised 120 documents including wills, powers of attorney, employment contracts and shareholder agreements.

Lupson says he recently spoke to a fellow entrepreneur who had spent somewhere in the region of $10,000 on creating a custom shareholders' agreement for his company. “We have our own LexisNexis agreement, costing just $149 as a document only, or just $999 which includes having an experienced lawyer hold your hand as you go through it step by step. That's a 90 per cent discount right there.”

Firms pay a subscription fee based on the number of lawyers seeking access. The premium subscription, which caters to five to 10 lawyers, is set at $199 per month. The platform is now offering a “12 months for the price of 10” deal.

Among LawPath clients is former iron man and fitness guru Guy Leech who says he has used it for two minor matters (both resolved in the first half hour of consultation) with the third ongoing, related to overseas intellectual property. “I'll continue to go down that track as I need to use my brand overseas for my fitness chain,” Leech says. Not only was using the platform “super easy”, he could not be happier with the lawyers selected. “They take the problem on and look after it. Being time-poor I just didn't have time to muck around with this.”

Two lawyers approached by Fairfax were less sanguine. Scott Freidman, a director at Sydney firm Harris Freidman Lawyers, said the “free time” hook was more akin to a supermarket ploy. “We sell advice. We don't sell products that you buy off the shelf. You don't give products away as a loss leader unless you were hopeful of converting that time into a job,” he says.

In Freidman's experience the free legal idea attracts “tyre-kicking” types who want a quick opinion and who never intend to take it further. “You can tell within 90 seconds if someone is looking for a freebie,” he says.

Janine De Saxe, a family law specialist at Sydney-based Doolan, Wagner & Callaghan, says that none of the lawyers listed on LawPath are prominent family law specialists. “It's not great from a consumer point of view. The lawyers are listed alphabetically by first name, which is such an odd and unhelpful way to do it,” she says.

Like Freidman, De Saxe says the clients coming for these free consults tend to be people who ring every free service they can find “either to get free advice, or to find the advice they want to hear”.

“It might be a useful tool for lawyers starting out or changing their area of work, but I can't see that longstanding lawyers who go by their reputation would be interested,” she said.